Various medical systems use ionizing radiation to acquire images of patients and/or provide treatment to patients, such as x-ray devices, computed tomography (CT) devices, fluoroscopic devices, and so on. For example, in a radiological imaging system, a beam of ionizing radiation (e.g., x-rays) is projected towards an exposed subject (e.g., patient). The ionizing radiation is attenuated when passing through the exposed subject and then received at a detector. The attenuation of the ionizing radiation is measured and processed to generate an image that can be viewed and analyzed.
Radiation doses can vary significantly between different types of studies, for example, a radiation dose for a routine head CT may be much lower than a dose for a multiphase abdomen and pelvis CT. In a typical CT imaging session, low dose scout images are acquired first for anatomy localization. A clinician may review the scout images, manually annotate anatomical regions, and set the radiation dose (and other scanning parameters) to acquire images of an anatomical region of interest. Or, anatomical regions can be identified automatically in the scout images without manual intervention and the local dose of radiation can be determined automatically based on some dose optimization strategies. Thus, automatic identification of anatomical regions with improved accuracy is generally desired.